Forex During Birth Shows Asian Women Top Men Private Bankers

Two women walk past high-rise buildings in the financial district of Hong Kong. Women control 29 percent of Asian wealth, higher than the global average of 27 percent, according to a 2010 study by the Boston Consulting Group. Photographer: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images

April 10 (Bloomberg) -- Tan Su Shan felt her first pangs of
labor while trading yen for a wealth-management client.

What to do? She took her laptop and mobile phone to a
Singapore delivery room and set up a foreign-exchange operation
lying flat on her back as doctors administered nitrous oxide to
ease the pain of giving birth.

“I was taking gas, calling the client and trying to go,
‘Haaaaah,’” recalled Tan, 45, who was working for Morgan
Stanley at the time and now heads private and consumer banking
at DBS Group Holdings Ltd. “I don’t know whether it was the
baby or the exchange rate” causing the heavy breathing.

Women like Tan are one reason why female private bankers
outnumber men in Asia 3-to-2 when it comes to managing the money
of the wealthy, according to executive-recruiting firm Korn
Ferry International. By contrast, the female-to-male manager
ratio in the U.S. is 1-to-4. In Switzerland, the world’s largest
wealth-management center, it’s 1-to-9.

Whether clients are gender-specific in their banker
preferences or not, more women are taking up the profession and
excelling, said Shalini Malkani, an executive recruiter at EMA
Partners International Ltd., a London-based firm that estimates
as many as 6,000 private bankers work in Asia. She cites
perceptiveness by women in dealing with couples as clients and a
growing number of women making key decisions in family
businesses or making money themselves.

“Because women often come across as sensitive and
empathetic, even many men would rather speak to a woman about
personal wealth matters than to another man,” Malkani said.

Wealthiest People

Singapore is the biggest wealth-management center in Asia,
which has the highest number of wealthy people in the world as
defined by at least $1 million in investable assets. Asian
millionaires increased 1.6 percent in 2011 to 3.37 million,
according to the World Wealth Report published by Royal Bank of
Canada and Capgemini SA. North America had 3.35 million, and
Europe 3.17 million. Still, North Americans had the most
investable wealth, at $11.4 trillion, compared with $10.7
trillion in Asia.

Women control 29 percent of Asian wealth, higher than the
global average of 27 percent, according to a 2010 study by the
Boston Consulting Group.

Unlike investment banking or sales and trading, where being
“on the markets, on the trade flows, on the deal flows and
executing full-time, 24/7,” said Tan, private banking is about
long-term relationships with clients, which allows for better
work-life balance and encourages greater participation by women.
DBS, based in Singapore, has 10 percent more female private
bankers than men, she said.

Urgent Call

Lim Li Li, a 47-year-old managing director at Bank of
Singapore Ltd., the private-banking unit of Singapore-based
Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp., recalled an occasion six years
ago while vacationing in Japan. She got an urgent call from a
wealthy Thai client, cut short her break and flew to Bangkok,
where she went directly to his house for a midnight meeting with
20 family members. She said she felt privileged to be the only
banker called in to solve a “major crisis” in the Thai
industrialist’s family.

“It was maybe my woman’s intuition, the sixth sense,
whatever, I don’t know,” Lim said, that led the Thai business
magnate to call on her instead of any of his male bankers.

Some first- or second-generation Asian entrepreneurs who
like control over and involvement in the management of their
wealth may prefer female relationship managers because it’s
easier to treat them as a friend or family member, Lim said.

Full Discretion

At Asia’s largest wealth-management firms, including
Citigroup Inc. and UBS AG, bankers have full discretion over
clients’ portfolios for just 4 percent of assets, according to a
2012 Boston Consulting Group report. That’s down from 7 percent
in 2006. The figure for Europe is 23 percent, up from 18 percent
six years earlier.

In Europe, where clients typically hold third- or fourth-generation wealth, the banker-client relationship is primarily
professional, where portfolio performance rather than family
matters are discussed at meetings.

“People recognize that if you’re in private banking in
Asia, you need patience, you need to have a listening ear, and
therefore it tends to attract women,” said Lim, whose team is
53 percent women. “I think men tend to go for the more macho
things like investment banking or corporate banking.”

‘Soft Touch’

Some Asian clients also entrust female private bankers more
than their male counterparts to educate young family members
about investments, risks and family-wealth planning, she said.

“After a while they get close to you, so you have the
relationship with the next generation as well,” said Lim, who
started her private-banking career at UBS in 2000. “Men tend to
be big picture, and they’re not very into details.”

The ability to employ the “soft touch,” such as sending
flowers or a box of chocolates to a client, whether male or
female, gives a woman an advantage over her male counterpart,
said Lim. If male bankers do the same, “it may send a wrong
message” of romantic interest or lack of manliness, she said.

“In general, Asian clients like to deal with female
bankers because they’re perceived to be more caring,” she said.

When a client mentions his son is studying in Australia and
is homesick, a female banker may be faster to pick up on that
and think of something to do, she said, such as sending a care
package with favorite foods.

Detecting Conflicts

Women can sometimes more easily detect conflicts between
family members, figure out when the wife is in charge of
finances even when the husband is doing all the talking and know
how to ask the right questions without sounding intrusive, said
DBS’s Tan.

“It’s more what’s not said,” she explained, adding that
in numerous meetings with millionaire male clients there’s a
“very silent, quiet lady next to them. No decision gets made
without their go-ahead.”

A degree of flexibility in working hours and the ability to
take time off for family draws women to the profession. Women in
Asia’s major cities have access to more-affordable domestic help
than in Europe or the U.S., as well as family assistance in
providing child care, making it easier for women to have
professional careers, said Tan.

“There are a lot of young women in Asia who before they
get married choose to join private banking,” she said. “So if
they decide to jump off the career ladder to have babies, they
can jump right back on quickly because after the babies come,
they’ve got a support system to help them.”

Culturally Negative

In Europe, men dominate private banking because of cultural
norms in some countries pressuring women to stay home to raise
children, Zabeen Hirji, chief human resources officer at Royal
Bank of Canada, said in an interview in Singapore.

“It’s not culturally seen as a negative thing for Asian
women to be working,” she said.

Switzerland is the world’s largest offshore wealth-management center with $2.1 trillion in assets, according to the
Boston Consulting Group. Hong Kong and Singapore combined manage
$1 trillion, and the consulting firm predicts they’ll surpass
Switzerland within 20 years.

Higher female participation in the labor force in Asia’s
two private-banking hubs is reflected in the greater proportion
of women bankers, said Dominique Boer, head of Southeast Asia
relationship management at Standard Chartered Plc’s private
bank. Three-fifths of women in Singapore and more than half in
Hong Kong work outside the home, according to a McKinsey & Co.
study last year, compared with 35 percent in India.

No Difference

Salaries of Singapore-based private bankers range from
S$90,000 ($72,600) to S$500,000, plus bonuses, depending on the
amount of assets managed, said Pan Zaixian, a Singapore-based
general manager at recruitment firm Kerry Consulting Pte., who
said he hasn’t observed “any difference between men and women
in private-banking” compensation.

Standard Chartered’s private bank, which has its global
headquarters in Singapore and ranks among the top 10 in Asia by
assets under management, according to Private Banker
International, said at least 60 percent of its relationship
managers in the city-state are women. Singapore has the highest
proportion of millionaire households in the world, at 17
percent, according to Boston Consulting Group.

Spokesmen for Citigroup and UBS didn’t provide male-female
ratios. Kathryn Shih, UBS’s Asia-Pacific chief executive officer
for wealth management and the only woman to head the business
for the top five private banks in Asia as ranked by Private
Banker, wasn’t made available for an interview.

RBC, Coutts

About half of the private-banking relationship managers at
JPMorgan Chase & Co., ranked fourth by size in Asia by Private
Banker, are women, according to data provided by the bank, which
declined to provide details or ratios for the U.S. HSBC Holdings
Plc, the third-largest wealth manager, and Credit Suisse Group
AG, at No. 5, didn’t provide any data.

At Royal Bank of Canada’s Asia wealth-management unit,
about 60 percent of relationship managers are women, according
to the bank. In Canada, the figure is about 16 percent. It’s 12
percent in the U.S. and 37 percent in the U.K.

At Coutts & Co., bankers to the Queen of England and the
private-banking division of Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, 65
percent of relationship managers in Asia are women, while in
Europe and the Middle East, it’s 37 percent, and in the U.K., 48
percent, data provided by the bank show.

In 2007 and 2008, when Singapore was expanding as a wealth-management hub and seeking to attract new clients, women were
hired from the hotel and airline industries to become private
bankers, Tan of DBS said.

Client Care

“Those days are gone,” she said. “There are now gates
that you have to go through that don’t allow just a pretty
face,” she said, referring to exams instituted in September
2011 for private bankers in Singapore that are a requirement for
providing financial advice.

Amanda Chen, the Singapore head of Morgan Stanley’s private
wealth-management unit, said she doesn’t think it matters if a
relationship manager is a man or a woman.

“If you take care of a client, and you really care about
the client’s well-being, whether it’s succession, family or
managing investments, you can do all that whether you’re a man
or a woman,” said Chen, who joined Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong
in 2002 after meeting Charles Mak, who ran the bank’s Asian
wealth-management unit, at a dinner while she was employed
selling equity derivatives at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

Sallie Krawchecks

Tan of DBS started at Morgan Stanley in the late 1990s,
after working at ING Barings SA. When she had her first child in
1999, she said she assured all her clients they could still
phone her anytime, while also introducing them to a temporary
replacement to handle day-to-day matters. With her second child
in 2000, she took juggling to a new level, she said, “feeding
one baby on one” breast, attaching a breast pump to the other,
all while watching scrolling business news headlines on TV.

“You kind of learn to multitask,” Tan said, adding that
balancing pregnancies and client responsibilities is a job
requirement.

“Are there a lot of Sallie Krawchecks in the U.S.?” said
Tan, referring to the former head of wealth management at
Citigroup and Bank of America Corp. “No, whereas there are lots
of Sallie Krawchecks in Asia.”